Note on Transliteration

List of Abbreviations

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The family milieu habitually exerts an important, often decisive, influence
on a human being. It has been long observed and established that parents,
specifically fathers, “are in a unique position to be the most powerful single
source of influence on a child, and the only consistent influence the child
is exposed to throughout childhood.”1 Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977),
one of the most celebrated writers of our time, is no exception. He grew up in a
refined family of diverse interests. The liberal values and wide-ranging
cultural
activities of the writer’s parents had a crucial impact on his worldview,
personality, predilections, and tastes.

1. Jurisprudence

Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was a jurist by occupation. In his choice of
profession, he followed in the footsteps of his father, Dmitri Nikolaevich
(1826–1904),
who served as the minister of justice (1878–85)
under two tsars
and who oversaw the implementation of the legal reforms introduced in the
reign of Alexander II. Among D. N. Nabokov’s most important accomplishments
was the preservation of the jury system that the reactionary forces
led by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the chief procurator of the Holy Synod,
sought to abolish...

2. Politics

After being forced to resign from teaching for his opposition to and outspokenness
against the regime policies, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov continued
to be active as a jurist by addressing various legal matters in his books and articles, by taking active part in Russian judicial organizations, and by attending
domestic and international professional symposia. At the same time,
while still teaching criminal law at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, he
became involved in the political life of Russia. His judicial and political activities
went hand in hand and complemented each other...

3. Literature

Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was a great aficionado and connoisseur of literature.
His diverse literary interests are manifest in his voluminous library at
the St. Petersburg family residence, which contained, alongside professional
books, belles lettres in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and other
languages.2 A passionate bibliophile, Vladimir Dmitrievich possessed broad literary
erudition. This is confirmed by even such an unfavorably inclined memoirist
as Kornei Chukovsky...

4. Painting, Theater, and Music

In chapter 3, I have shown V. D. Nabokov’s great appreciation for and outstanding
erudition in belles lettres and his impact on his son’s literary edification
and tastes. No less passionately did the senior Nabokov love painting, theater, and music. In this chapter, I demonstrate Vladimir Dmitrievich’s
deep and sophisticated knowledge in these three spheres of culture and discuss
its bearing on his eldest son...

5. Lepidoptera, Chess, and Sports

Alongside the devotion to creative writing that became Nabokov’s lifetime
vocation, his great fascination with the fine arts, interest in theater, and
enviable knowledge of music, V. D. Nabokov inculcated in his firstborn a
lasting passion for butterflies and an enduring enthusiasm for chess and
sports. All of these pursuits, without which Nabokov’s persona and his
literary legacy cannot be fully comprehended, manifest themselves in his
oeuvre...

Conclusion

In this book, I have examined the various ways in which Nabokov’s personality
and worldview were affected by his father. To be sure, their lives
were different in so many ways. Nabokov lived to the rather advanced age
of seventy-eight
and died of natural causes, whereas his father was cut down
in the prime of life, shortly before his fifty-second
birthday. Nabokov attained
enormous success as a world-famous
writer, whereas his father, who
steadfastly toiled to create a democratic Russia, only witnessed his life’s work
destroyed by the Bolshevik usurpation of power, his own name and accomplishments
gradually relegated into undeserved oblivion from which history
only recently has begun extricating him...

Appendix 1: V. D. Nabokov, “The Kishinev Bloodbath”

Everyone in whom human sentiment is not dead has read the sad tale of the
Kishinev pogroms with deep indignation and heartache. Already a concise
government report that enumerated the dead and the wounded, in spite of
its laconism and official aridity, made it possible to guess that something
monstrous had happened.1...

Appendix 2: V. D. Nabokov, “Soviet Rule and Russia’s Future”

When in the autumn of 1917 the question of a Bolshevist coup d’état was
discussed in authoritative circles, all those in Russia who admitted this
contingency—and
there were not a few—entertained
no doubt that the duration
of a Bolshevist regime would be ephemeral. These anticipations were
based on essentially the same line of argument as those which were applied
to the great European War. In August, 1914, everybody thought that in 1915
all would be over...

When a certain scientist in a certain country after a certain civic upheaval
was asked officially how he regarded the new regime, his answer was, “with
surprise.” To a normal human being it is a surprise to discover that one’s mind
is something that can and must be nationalized and rationed by the government,
and this is about all that can be said about modern dictatorships. In
themselves they are much too ugly and dull and unappetizing to provoke
anything more than contempt...

Appendix 4: Vladimir Nabokov, “About Opera”

It would be rather amusing to find out whether or not opera is a natural art.
By natural art I mean such art that either has its likeness or correspondence
in nature, as for example a Doric column or Beethoven sonata, or that directly
emulates nature and human life, as for example painting or theater. The
question about the naturalness of opera, of course, gets more complicated in
that opera is a mixture of several arts; it is necessary therefore to determine
whether this mixture is something natural, or more precisely, which conditions
are required for this mixture to be natural. Let’s begin ab ovo...

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